Don’t live in the grand old U.S. of A.? It stands to reason that this law may be coming to a yard sale near you, anyway. Internationally speaking, large countries can set the standard that other countries follow, with respect to law.

So, how do you know if you have a recalled product? Fortunately, a lot of countries’ governments have websites to help you identify hazardous items. That’s what this article is for!

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)

The CPSC is the federal commission behind the crackdown on selling recalled items in white elephant sales. Although the law may be hard to comply with, due to the sheer number of recalled products, at least they try to help.

At the site you can search on products, see latest product recalls in the United States, or even send a complaint about a product. More specifically, the CPSC has a handbook to help you out. You might want to download a copy of the 24-page Handbook for Resale Stores and Product Resellers. Warning, it’s a PDF file.

The rest of these sites aren’t a whole lot different in content than the CPSC, however, it’s important to list them as MakeUseOf has a lot of viewers from these countries as well.

That being said, Recalls Australia provides some services to help you stay on top of recalls. They provide an email subscription service that provides you with daily alerts about categories that you are interested in. Maybe you’re a parent and want to get daily updates on toys. This would be a good service.

Also, you can subscribe for customized RSS feeds that are updated hourly. Moreover, they now provide advanced search options, so you can narrow down to a product that you are researching. Well worth the time for our Australian friends.

It seems odd that this site appears to be independently run. The United Kingdom’s official recall site seems to be the Trading Standards Institute, however the page dealing with recalls is sadly lacking useful tools. That would be why the UKRecallNotice site is far more popular, according to website statistics.

UKRecallNotice relies on updates from the Trading Standards Institute as well as from searching newspapers. From there, they categorize the notices, making recalls easier to find. They also have an e-mail list that you can join to get the daily recalls. Hopefully, they’ll branch into providing an RSS feed as well. That’s always nice.

Health Canada

My home country’s site leaves a lot to be desired as well. Note the lame logo. This particular page does have search capabilities, but is limited to consumer products. What does that mean?

To my friends in India, being one of the largest groups of our readers, I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to find a good product recall site for there. I don’t know if it’s because I’m searching in English or not, yet if you know of one, please share it with the rest of the readers in the comments.

I urge all of our readers from ANY country to share their country’s product recall site in the comments. Obviously, I can’t include all the countries but with you adding links, we can compile a good list. Perhaps this list might one day save someone’s life. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of that?

With 20+ years of experience in IT, training, and technical trades, it is my desire to share what I've learned with anyone else willing to learn. I strive to do the best job possible in the best manner possible, and with a little humour. Keep in touch: Twitter - Facebook…